Topic: Persona 5 Strikers

@timleon
Exactly. The characters are phenomenal. And for P4D specifically, the story was boring, but the characters were great, the music was superb and the gameplay was incredibly addictive. All the ingredients needed to pull someone into the Persona universe.

I’d played Persona 4 Golden before, but only the first two hours. So I don’t really count that as a previous experience. It certainly didn’t get me into the series.

But ya, Persona has some of THE best spin-offs in all of gaming.

@TeeJay
Ya. There’s pros and cons, for sure.

Persona spinoffs are rather famously good, and it sounds like Strikers challenges the Persona Q games as one of the best of the bunch.

@JaxonH I haven't encountered a series that makes so many offbeat spinoffs, yet makes every single one of them work, as well as Persona. Why in the heck would we need a Dancing game for the recent three mainline games? I don't know but who cares?! It's there, we get some sick dances, and some decent memes.

With Persona 4 having such great music, it was a natural pick for a dancing game. It just so happens they came up with the best rhythm game I’ve ever played, gameplay wise.

The thing is, I don’t feel it worked as well on the TV. The input lag was worse than on Vita, and your peripheral view didn’t encompass the entire screen which made it easy to miss notes. While on Vita, being a handheld, the screen fit perfectly in your peripheral view. It was a handheld game first if I’ve ever seen one.

And that’s why it puzzles me so much that they haven’t brought the dancing games over to Switch. I didn’t like P5D nearly as much as P4D. The music just wasn’t as good and it didn’t have any story (even if the story wasn’t good in P4D, it at least gave you a reason to play). It also had way less songs. But I’d take any of them. Better than nothing.

P5D and P3D are both worse than P4D for sure

P3D definitely imo has better remixes for its game's soundtrack than P5D does but the lack of proper single player content even if P4D's story was very surface level and uninspired really hurt those games.

I picked all three of them up on Vita and out of the three I'd say P4D is still the most polished one. Honestly it does confuse me as to why out of all the Persona spinoffs the rhythm games are still PlayStation-exclusive

@Ralizah Honestly out of the Q games I still consider Q1 to be pretty mediocre, especially in the story department. Take all of the Persona fanservicey stuff out of the equation and it's a pretty simple and disposable plot imo. The interactions among particular characters are cute but there isn't really much else that hooked me.

PQ2 is better in both departments for sure. It helps that the narrative feels a lot more cohesive without the different cast routes and the story being exclusively told from the Phantom Thieves' perspectives

In terms of favorite Persona spinoffs for me it'd have to be Arena Ultimax, Q2 and Strikers

@TheFrenchiestFry It's an EO game, so the story element isn't one that really matters to me at all. That game really shines in the dungeon department: very puzzle-heavy dungeon design, which is unusual for either series, and some extremely humorous setpieces. The new characters are fun as well.

I liked it quite a bit more than the first EO Untold. The narrative bits do a better job of not intruding on the gameplay.

I haven’t played much of Persona Q2, but I have played some. My biggest disappointment was it not being in 3D (I loved the 3D, it was the defining feature of the 3DS, and added so much to the experience).

That aside, it felt high quality for the hardware it was running on. 3DS was a charming little system. It wasn’t that powerful but it was able to produce some really high-quality games. I don’t think PQ2 would fare well on a system like Switch, just because of the chibi characters and simplistic designs, but a sequel on Switch, more in line with what Bravely Default 2 did, that would be cool to see.

Though, I’m still not sure what’s going to happen with Etrian Odyssey now that the era of dual screen gaming is over (which btw, MAJOR missed opportunity not developing an exclusive EO for Wii U- then again, 3rd party software sales were anemic on Wii U so, I understand).

@JaxonH I hope this isn’t a spoiler but on the dungeon 5th was a classic warp puzzle.

That gave me a smile, and the final proof not that it’s needed at this point that this is an SMT game first.

I love turn based combat but this is really fun too. It can get a bit crazy but I like that you can pause things to change personas etc.

Strangely I could never get into Ni No Kuni which was a little similar, now maybe I can give that another go.

I’ve finished Persona Q2 and I really enjoyed it. I really like EO too. I haven’t started Persona Q though, after hearing it’s a bit average.

@JoeDiddley
Ha... I’m playing Persona Q2 right now. Picked it up 10 min ago after talking about it. All this strikers has given me the Persona itch.

I really wish this game had English voice acting. The cast is so good, so it’s a real shame that it’s Japanese only. I never understood the appeal of Japanese VA to those who don’t speak JP, unless the VA is like, downright atrocious. I heard people saying thank goodness for it in Monster Hunter Rise due to the voiced shoutouts. Which kinda puzzled me since you can control the frequency slider from 0 - 100%. I wouldn’t want to play through a game like that without English. Or any game, for that matter. Then again, it does have “MH language” with grunts, which is admittedly pretty nostalgic and cool. So maybe I can understand after all, even if I personally wouldn’t choose that over English.

Anyways, I do love how choosing Persona skills and switching Personas pauses time, because it does indeed get very hectic at times.

Beat the game last night! I really enjoyed this one, definitely my favourite of the Persona spin-offs (Persona 4 Arena Ultimax previously held that title). I'd like to do the post-game requests but I have so many other games I need to play right now so I'll have to come back to it later. Probably going to go back to Trails of Cold Steel to finish that up then take a short break from JRPGs before jumping into Bravely Default II.

@JaxonH I agree, I would have loved Persona Q2 so much more if it had English VA. English VA in general makes a big difference to me when playing JRPGs, it's fun to just sit back and listen to it like a movie.

Wow, that seems quick! (Personally I've only managed to do one jail at this point, although I've been playing others games and I've had a very busy couple of weeks at work!)

What was your total play time in the end?

I'm very happy this game is mentioned in the same breath as the original Persona 5 and shows just how good this game was at staying faithful to the original series whilst adding so many new additions. As with Age of Calamity Koei Tecmo really have a knack for making games like this. Can't wait to see which series they tackle next, maybe Final Fantasy?

@JaxonH I suspect it wasn’t worth the money for Atlus to dub Persona Q2 at the end of the 3DS’s life. I agree it would have been great if they had. I don’t mind subs by any means but I play all my SMT games dubbed when given the option. So for a spin off dubbed would have been better.

@Cynas I beat Persona 5 Strikers last night too, the last couple of dungeons went quicker than I expected. That was such a great game. It deserves to do well.

@timleon Yeah I had nothing on my plate this weekend so playing P5S was pretty much all I did. When I started this weekend I was only on the third Jail, so I made quite a bit of progress.

My playtime says 50 hours in-game, but there were multiple times near the beginning where I had to pause the game and leave it for quite a while, so I'd wager it's more like 40-45 hours. I completed all the requests up until the end of the game, so that's with doing most of the side content.

I'm making my way through the final jail right now. Not ready for this to be over....

@Cynas Thanks, that's about what I expected based on other reports. Good length for this type of game. It's very rare that I'm willing to play anything longer than 50 hours!

Id love to play Persona 5 strikers but I need to play Persona 5 first.

Heck Im still in the middle of playing Persona 4 but I am tired of the whole school year time limit crap that goes on

Any chance they will implement cross-save with Steam? If yes then it would be an instant buy for me on Switch.

@urrutiap If you don't like it in P4 you're probably not going to like it in P5. P3-5 all have a pretty uniform and similar structure in regards to the time management aspect of everything being able to be done during specific parts of the day throughout the year